
Crop/Production
Company: PD Koseca Location: North-west Slovakia Director: Peter Cibik
Product/Usage
- Bactériolit
Testimonial
Area: 1,800 ha, half of which is pastureland.
Crops: Wheat, barley, rye, peas, soybeans, corn, rapeseed, sugar beet, triticale.
Livestock: Pigs, cows.
Soil type: Sandy, with a lot of clay in some fields and many rocks (there used to be a river here). The soil was very compact, and the humus layer was very thin due to intensive farming.
MOTIVATIONS
To improve soil quality and reduce chemical inputs. PD Koseca owns a butcher shop and supplies meat to schools. Among its customers is a Michelin-starred restaurant. Peter Cibik has an extremely strong logic: healthy soil => healthy forage and feed for meat production => healthy food for consumers.
FERTILIZATION
PD Koseca uses digestate from a biogas plant. The dose of digestate is 24 t/ha twice a year. Before working with SOBAC, they used about 100-200 kg of ammonium nitrate in addition to the digestate. From the first year of using BACTÉRIOLIT, Peter stopped using ammonium nitrate, reduced the dose of digestate from 24 t to 18-20 tonnes/ha, and stopped using fungicides. Peter started working with SOBAC in 2020.
QUOTE
My fields with BACTERIOLIT are much less compacted. Water management has improved, water infiltrates more quickly into the soil and we have significantly decreased the smell of digestate in the fields. We used to have some problems with black PR on this subject.
VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE :
Peter believes that farmers who use a lot of chemicals endanger themselves, as well as those around them and consumers of agricultural products. According to him, the answers to this challenge lie in taking care of the soil with natural solutions and using products that are not harmful to nature and people, and SOBAC is a very valuable help.
Results
RESULTS OBSERVED (SPRING 2022)
- A clear improvement in soil life (1,220 worm holes counted per m² in the field with BACTÉRIOLIT compared to 80 worm holes per m² in the control field).
- Much better soil aeration.
- A much lower pH variation from top to bottom, which is better for the crops (0.6 pH units versus 3.5 pH units for the control field).
- Roots four times longer on the SOBAC side: 35 cm deep in the control field versus 120 cm deep with BACTÉRIOLIT.
- An increase in carbon stored in the soil layers, especially under the humus layer.
- The yield was 6.2 t/ha of winter barley, slightly above the average for the region.